Pages

Monday, 26 November 2012

Don’t Go To A Bar in Lagos, You Just Might Be Arrested!

If you are an active member of the
Nigerian tweetosphere, you will have seen this story trending on
Saturday. Here’s what really happened

On Friday, the 23rd of November, my
friend went for a drink in a bar near his house. Members of the Nigerian
Police Force came around 11pm and picked about 7 of them up from that
bar. Dumping their victims into the back of a black van, loosely
referred to as a “Black Maria”, they went on a raiding spree. Picking
patrons of different pubs and bars around the Yaba environs, there was
no method to the madness. There was no case of profiling; they picked
girls and guys! One guy was hauled out of his car, leaving his
bewildered girlfriend behind. They went into bars, just randomly dumping
people in the back of their vans and they headed towards Sabo police
station.

Fortunately, their mobile phones were
not collected so my friend went on a tweeting spree. By the time the
battery of his smart phone died, he had been transferred to the Task
Force office in Alausa. As I drove to Yaba in the morning to get him
some form of identification (seeing as he had just gone on a leisurely
stroll down the road) I went through different stages of anger. Mostly
at the state of things in Nigeria. The question that kept reverberating
in my head was “Can a man not peacefully spend his money in a bar any
more in Nigeria?”

We spend hours in traffic plying through
bad roads. We get home and there’s no power supply. We can’t turn on
the generator because there’s fuel scarcity and the queues to buy petrol
stretch over a mile long and then we can’t even go to a bar to have a
cold drink? I don’t know about you guys but the problem with this
country runs deep.

By 9am the following morning, the
‘officers’ who picked them up had still not told them what their crime
was. The girls amongst them were thrown in solitary confinement and the
guys were locked up in a little enclosure.
As friends and family of the people who had been held hostage gathered
outside, testimonies were shared of how this was a regular occurrence.
Someone said “This is December time, when dem police dem dey broke,
dem go just go dey carry people up and down. Na money una go take bail
una sef commot. No be serious matter” Another person said “People
wey no get any person toh come for dem, if dem stay for 3 days and
nobody come, dem go move dem go Badagry! From dia, pesin go just miss.”

I literally shivered! Badagry ke? I
hurriedly grabbed my phone, asking my friend to find out what the
procedure for using money to regain his freedom. He was surprisingly
very calm. Knowing he’s a bit of a smart mouth, I asked if he hadn’t
been running off his mouth at any of the police guys, to which he
responded “Omo! I’m gentle oh! They’re brushing guys here. If you behave like you’re too smart sef, they’ll beat you black and blue.”

A few hours and a whole lot of Tweets
later, somebody called someone who called somebody else and KB was
released. The questions, however, remained unanswered. “What was their
crime?” “Why were they picked up?” “If we supposedly live in a society
were the constitution is the grundnorm, should things like these still
happen?” If in a democracy, civilians can’t exercise their rights to
move freely then I weep for my nation.

We need to NOT tolerate these things as
the norm. We need to NOT make excuses for extra-judicial killings. we
need to NOT accept what is WRONG as RIGHT!

We need to say “NO!”, and if you don’t
think we should, then remember, that like a Ferris wheel, these things
have a way of coming back around.

How do we ensure that these things stop?
How do we bring this to the notice of the Inspector General of Police?
Whose responsibility is it to make sure that law abiding citizens are
safe? How do we ensure that the State Government puts a stop to this
kind of extra-judicial bullying.